The first transportation records delivered to the Convention's Joint Committee on Transition Facts have produced an inconvenient result for almost everyone who has been describing Korda's lake corridor as a single economic region.
It is not one.
Freight records submitted this week show a pronounced north-south difference in how communities along Lake Varda move goods, people and services.
The northern corridor sends a substantial share of its commercial traffic toward Kelvant. Freight from several northern districts reaches Rhondel before it reaches Korda's interior distribution network. Residents there are more likely to use Kelvant-based wholesalers, repair yards and professional services, according to records supplied to the committee.
Farther south, the pattern changes.
Southern lake districts remain much more closely connected to Korda's interior road system. Agricultural traffic moves west and inland before moving north. Local service networks overlap heavily with communities outside the corridor. Several of the southern districts that would have participated in the canceled merger referendum appear, by freight movement alone, less economically integrated with Kelvant than their northern neighbors.
Committee co-chair Jalen Mire cautioned against treating transportation data as a substitute for the petition that brought the corridor question this far.
"People signed for the district that was certified," Mire said. "A freight table does not make those signatures smaller."
But he also acknowledged that the records complicate the assumption that the corridor behaves as one unit.
"If the question is what people asked for, we know that already," he said. "If the question is what happens afterward, then this is exactly why we asked for the numbers."
Tomas Rell, the committee's other co-chair, was less surprised.
"Lines on a petition map do not make every road run the same direction," he said.
Rell has argued throughout the Convention that any departure from Korda must be considered alongside its effects on what remains. He declined to say whether the new data changed his position on the merger proposal.
The committee has not recommended a boundary change, and no delegate has introduced a resolution dividing the existing corridor.
Dessa Orin called the submission "useful and incomplete."
She said transportation patterns alone cannot establish what portion of Korda is economically viable, culturally coherent or capable of meeting the responsibilities of eventual Statehood.
The committee is still awaiting additional fiscal-transfer records and transition-cost estimates.
For the moment, the most significant finding may be the simplest one.
The corridor that reached the Convention as one defined geographic petition does not live as one economic place.